


something to be said

by Snowsheba



Series: gency week [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Gency, Gency Week, Scars, prompt today was healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-22 21:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11389044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snowsheba/pseuds/Snowsheba
Summary: Angela doesn't have any scars - visible ones, at least.





	something to be said

**Author's Note:**

> prompt today was **healing** , thus the idea that angela's work with nanites and nanobots have significantly decelerated her aging, healed her skin, etc etc.

Her work with nanites has had one interesting effect: every scar she’d gotten in the line of duty disappeared almost overnight. Not that she had too many to begin with, but it had been a shock to look at herself in the mirror and not see the long line of ghostly white just below her ribs. She’d had that one since she was just a child, when she had been playing a bit too roughly with her neighbors and gotten a long scratch on her torso, and now, years later – gone. Like it had never happened.

The same is true of the burn grazing the inside of her elbow – from a cooking experiment gone wrong. A neat incision at her waist – had to dig a bullet out of her flesh once. A scar that looped under her kneecap – an unfortunate meeting between her knee and a rock. All traces have disappeared, and with them the reminders of those experiences.

It’s odd, but she finds herself missing them. Such is the price of duty, she supposes, but what a strange price to pay.

* * *

But if she is a case study, Genji is her polar opposite. His entire body – what’s left of it – is covered in scar tissue, most of which isn’t his own doing. He is a canvas on which a masterpiece of pain is painted, and she knows that he sees her flawless, unblemished skin and sees it as a joke, or perhaps a taunt. Whatever the case, Angela keeps her mouth shut, focusing her efforts on healing him physically before helping him mentally, emotionally; those he has to heal on his own. She is always hard-working, but there is only so much she can do at a single moment in time.

“What could you know of pain?” Genji asks of her one day, and almost reflexively she looks to her elbow. Unscarred, now, but the memory is there, and he follows her eyes. She can hear the sneer in his voice when he says, “What, did you get a papercut there once?”

“I’ve given myself stitches in the middle of a battlefield,” she answers without quite meaning to, and before he can go on, “I’ve taken a bullet out of my own skin alone. I have witnessed death and agony and have been unable to stop it at times.” She doesn’t glare at him, focusing her attention on the slash on his arm. “Do not lecture me about pain.”

And so he doesn’t. The rest of his visit passes in silence.

* * *

They become better friends after that, surprisingly. Both of them airing out time-old issues, in a way, and Genji prefers to spend his time with her as weeks turn into months turn into years. It’s easy to just sit together, not saying anything and working on their own things; it’s easy to talk, too, about the mundane and the extraordinary and the things they carry with them.  It’s easy, too easy, and then one day he takes her hand in his and says, quietly, “Tell me about your scars.”

“I don’t have any,” she says, telling herself to pull away. She doesn’t, instead grips his fingers with her own. “Not anymore.”

“Not that we can see,” Genji says. She doesn’t say anything, and he presses, “If not now, then when? If not me, then who?”

He has a point, which would be exasperating if it wasn’t sad and pathetic. Angela does not have many friends, not in this line of work, and Genji, at least, isn’t likely to get himself killed anytime soon, mostly because it’s harder for him to be injured in the first place.

So she says, instead, “I will start from the beginning, then.”

* * *

He traces his thumb over her hip, sometimes, where she had removed a bullet from her own flesh. He touches in the inside of her elbow, where she had burned herself, and when she’s sitting, his fingers press against the base of her kneecap, when she had fallen. Other ones, too – a cut at the base of her skull where she had once been knocked unconscious, several cuts along the side of her foot from where shrapnel had dug into her boot, and the long, white line beneath her ribs. This he traces delicately, almost reverently, and in turn she smooths her thumb across the scars of his cheeks and feels the bumps and unevenness of his skin.

“It must be strange, not to have a physical record,” he says to her eventually, eyes staring intently into hers. She touches the junction between his chest and his chestplate, delicately, and he takes in a sharp breath, leaning into her without quite realizing it.

“Yes,” she agrees, gasping a little when his fingers press into the space between her shoulder blades. “But it is proof that medicine has advanced very far. If we can remove scar tissue, then what else will we be capable of?”

“Healing this much might not be a good thing,” Genji murmurs against her neck, “If it takes mistakes and makes them seem like nothing.”

“I agree,” she says, and if it surprises him, he doesn’t show it. Instead she winds her arms around him and pulls him close, and there’s a metaphor here somewhere but she doesn’t know what it is and maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t matter.

* * *

“There’s something to be said for someone whose pain is buried deep,” he says to her.

He doesn’t heal her from that, this she knows, but – “You help me heal,” she tells him, and his kiss is soft and sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on [tumblr](https://snowsheba.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
